Sunday, August 31, 2008

My Challenge to Complete Work

Well, It appears to me that there will be very little chance of me keeping up a 2 pages a week schedule next year. Between family and work, I am on the go from 6am to 8pm 5 days a week. I promised my wife that I would set aside time on Sundays for family. This really only leaves me Saturday to work, and sometime that gets a little filled with errands and dropping off comics around town. Not that I am complaining, it is just my life outside of making comics takes up so much of my time.

So my challenge is to now find a way to keep posting new material each week and not ignore my job and family commitments. I have been taking a sketchbook to work and sketching out future story ideas during lunch. This should help on the planning stages for future strips. I am also using the computer to help me remix and edit panels, so maybe I will not have to draw full pages each week. Maybe I can use some quick editing to come up with remix strips to fill one week each month. I see many positive possibilities, and I am looking forward to the challenges that next year will provide.

Looking ahead, as the next year starts I should have about 8-10 weeks of strips completed and with the help of holidays and spring break I should be able to make it through the summer with out much trouble. It appears that September through October will be the most challenging.

Today I am finishing up the 6 pages that I have been working on since the second week of August. Next weekend I will start to finish up issue #5 and prepare it for printing for the first week of October. I also need to complete #6, at least the art portion of the book. I have 3 pages done so far, so it should not be much of a problem to prepare that book for publication for late December. This work should fill the month of September, but If I get done early then it is back to working on the weekly strip.

So, while I still have not been able to get 2 pages done a week, while working as a teacher, I feel that I am still completing a heck of a lot of work compared to my last 10 years worth of output, since I publishedTales of the Mans in 1996.

No pictures this week. I planned to put up an example of the process that I am using to complete the work, but I have not completed anything yet. Hopefull during the week some time (probably Friday.)